User blog:Azure Helm/Azure's Back (kinda?) and Exalted
Sweet Celestia, it's been almost 3 years since my last blog post! *blows dust off the keyboard* Okay, gotta make this a good one. Let me start by addressing anyone who knows/remembers me from years ago: hello friends, enemies, and everything beyond and in between! I'd like to apologize for how I've been largely absent from the Twitter scene. I'll get into the reasons for that later, but first I want to say that I'm sorry to anyone I've let down, flaked on, or just generally disappointed either through my RP or my actions. Now, to any and all people I've encountered more recently, hello and welcome to me! I hope I've made a good impression so far, because I truly do enjoy meeting and interacting with new people. That's a big part of why I joined Twitterponies in the first place, and it's also part of what I'll be saying later in this post. Also, strap yourselves in for a long ride. People who know me can tell you that I write a lot, and I especially have a lot to talk about here, so it's going to be a long read. In this first section, I'm going to describe my background and how I got into Twitterponies. I'll use my main twitter profile, @mlp_Azurehelm, as an example. Twitter says that I joined sometime in 2008, though back then Twitter was something I hardly thought about. I posted a handful of tweets over the course of 3 years. At that time in my life, I was busy with school, socializing, and my first serious romantic relationship, and I was a lot less open then than I am now. That all changed in 2011. My relationship began heading south, my schoolwork was less engaging and I was dropping my classes, and I was feeling overwhelmed by everything being seemingly out of my control. In November 2011, two major events drove me into a mild depression that has since haunted me. First, I decided to leave college and move back into my parents' house. I felt guilty for barely attending classes when my parents were footing most of a $40,000 tuition bill, so I decided to spare them the trouble of what I thought was largely a waste of money. Second, shortly after moving back home, my relationship came to an abrupt halt after a series of poorly handled disagreements with her parents. So, aside from a small part-time job that was barely letting me pay off my student loans, I felt like I was near rock bottom. One of the only things I had to look forward to was an annual party with my highschool friends for New Years. I was used to the party being a night of fun party games with my closest friends, but that year I got to meet some new friends. I had a blast that night even with these people that I hardly knew, and I realized that part of me wanted more. After the holidays, I started looking for ways to fill my time other than playing video games and pining over what I had lost. Around that time, I was also starting to get into MLP. I forget how exactly, but I wound up subscribing to Twilight Sparkle and the other Manes on Twitter. I'd dabbled with roleplaying before this point, but never seriously gotten into it. As I learned more about Twitterponies, it seemed like the perfect place for me to both spend time, enjoy myself, meet new people, and learn more about roleplaying. In January 2012, I dusted off my twitter account and turned myself into Azure Helm, bringing him to Equestria for the first time. Within weeks, I began meeting other players and making new friends, some of whom I'm still very close to today. Twitterponies became a big part of my life, something I would look forward to every day because of all the wonderful people I met and interacted with. I also enjoyed the setting, a fantastic world where almost anything was possible. I found that I loved writing out Azure's adventures, enough to spend the entire day posting tweets. I manged to reach over 20,000 posts within my first year of playing as Azure. Here is where I talk about my experiences and observations of Twitterponies. However, as I delved deeper into Twitterponies, I started to see that the world was not quite as limitless as it first seemed. The main limitation was the setting - events in Twitterponies couldn't really diverge too much from the FiM show, for risk of compromising the canon of events. For instance, the recent RP events with the Changelings have been controversial because they might be straying far from their canonical role as sworn enemies of ponykind. Events like this that have the potential to shake the foundations of Twitterponies are treated with great caution. There's nothing wrong with that, in fact such things should be approached cautiously because of the way the Twitterponies is structured, how it functions. Another limitation I discovered was, ironically, the lack of structure. In other roleplay settings, namely RPGs (both video game and tabletop), there are entire rulesets that clearly define what a character can and cannot do. Some games have so many rules, they fill entire books, and even they don't cover every possible situation. In Twitterponies, however, where every character has a player, the only limitations are the player's imagination. Personally, this led me into situations where my character was pitted against another in what was essentially a battle of wits and wills, each trying to outdo the other until one of us decided to throw in the towel. Many scenes I've experienced and witnessed have also been harmed, complicated, or at the very least slowed down by the structure of trying to roleplay through Twitter. Posts are limited in size, so descriptions have to be either brief or split into segments. Everyone has to look for everyone else involved with a scene to get the full picture of what is happening, and sometimes the sheer number of participants in a given scene can make events hard or impossible to follow in real-time. Many scenes are organized outside of the Twitter feed because it's nearly impossible to execute a scene in real time without any preparation beforehand. Twitterponies is a community of thousands of players, and it seems that there is more of a focus on them than on the scenes they form and stories they tell as a group. What I find interesting about this is how it makes it both easy and difficult for new players to come into the roleplay. On one hand, any character idea is possible to fit into the world because there are so few concrete scenes to outline what does and doesn't exist in the world. At the same time, it limits how grand of a background new characters can have, how wide the scope of their abilities can be, since wouldn't more people have heard of them before now? This is something I've personally discovered only recently, as I've tried to get Azure back into the Twitterponies game and found it hard to bring what I feel is an accurate portrayal of my character into the world without feeling like I'm overextending myself by bringing a character into the world that's more developed than the average. At the same time, I feel like it would be a shame to roll back my character to make him into something new, as if that would be throwing away what I've already done with him. On top of that, I find that other people I knew from back in Azure's hayday have moved on with their lives, completely writing him out of their stories. I had a conflict about this in particular with another player who was upset when, after returning from my latest hiatus, I decided to make a radical change to Azure's story. It wasn't something that affected them, since they never interracted with that Azure and that part of their story anymore, so I felt that them suddenly being upset by it was unreasonable. Still, I valued their friendship and came to a compromise with them because I didn't want to feel like I was damaging their character. That brings me to one of my greatest grievances with Twitterponies. As I referenced earlier, the main focus is on players and not so much on the world. Every player wants to feel like they're important, the center of attention, and while they are entitled to that to some degree, there's just no way to completely satisfy everyone. Part of that is the setting; some characters are elevated over others just because the show focuses on them. Part of it is the sheer volume of players; with so many people to split the spotlight, either everyone gets only a very small cut of the pie or the distribution becomes uneven. I think that this was touched upon in the FiM Season 5 premier episodes, showing the two different approaches to this problem. One approach is to have every character be practically the same, all equal with nobody shining out above the rest, a flawed approach in that you can only bring everyone down to the lowest of everyone else's levels. The other approach is to embrace the differences that make us special, and to use them to enhance each other and the world. I think that while the second approach is better, only the first approach is possible in a setting like Twitterponies where the world takes a backseat to the individuals in it. Now, most of this is just what I have discovered recently with my re-exposure to what introducing a "new" character to Twitterponies is like. I feel that I've come a long way from who and where I was when I first joined TP over 3 years ago. I owe a lot of my progress (and heartfelt thanks) to the friends that I've made through TP, even the ones to whom I no longer speak. In particular, one friend introduced me and several others to another roleplay that I've thoroughly enjoyed, and to which I'd like to extend an invitation to anyone interested in an exciting new experience. For anyone interested in a tabletop roleplaying game I'm hosting, read this section. Several years ago, a friend I met through Twitterponies asked me to join a group in playing a tabletop RPG called Exalted. I fell in love with the game and the setting almost as soon as I started, and I've been playing on-and-off for years, which is partially to blame for why I've been so absent from TP. The main attraction to me was that Exalted is more focused on stories and the world at large than Twitterponies, without sacrificing what makes each character unique and special with their own personal developments. I'm about to start hosting my own Exalted game, and I'd like to invite you, yes you, to join me! If you've ever played a tabletop game before, or if you're a first-timer looking to try something new, I would be delighted to teach you this new game and to play with you. Just so you know what you're getting into, Exalted is primarily a roleplay like Twitterponies, but it is also a game - it is possible to fail and to lose your character if you're not careful. Chances are that won't happen while you're just learning to play though, since the game is player-run and not just determined by numbers. A good game usually doesn't kill off its main characters early in the story. Rather than give a summary of what Exalted is about, I'll just list off several (very few) of the near limitless things you can do in this game: *Conquer Death itself and its minions, one of whom may have been you in a previous life *Discover why the Transformers are trying to steal souls from the world *Punish the Jedi Council for taking your place as the Masters of Everything *Have dinner with your ex-wife: a 2000-year-old shapeshifting man-eating monster *Help your patron God go to rehab for his drub habit *Fight magical assassin-monks with color-coded suits of power armor *Breed a race of sentient dinosaurs that speak in riddles and poop out pure gold *And so much more! If I've grabbed your attention enough for you to learn more about this game, feel free to DM me @mlp_AzureHelm, and we can start talking about it! But what does this mean for Azure Helm and Twitterponies? As much as I enjoy Twitterponies and playing as Azure Helm, I still feel disconnected from the TP universe, both as my character and as someone who just prefers a different style of roleplay. Given the choice between Twitterponies and Exalted, I do prefer Exalted for its structure and encouragement towards being creative. Exalted encourages its players to find ways to change the world to whatever they want it to be. That said,' I will still gladly roleplay as Azure with anyone who wants me to show up in Twitterponies'. If you want to RP with Azure, just let me know, even if I've been quiet for a while! Category:Blog posts